Thursday, March 17, 2016

Overview of reports on compromise of Allied communications in WWII

When
researching WWII signals intelligence and codebreaking operations it is
important to track down all the available sources of information, from POW
interrogations and captured documents to detailed reports summarizing Allied cipher
policy, decisions and compromises.

It is
reasonable to assume that in the postwar era all the Allied countries tried to
assess the extent of the compromise of their communications during WWII. Thus
I’ve tried to track down these reports. In the following space i’m going to
list the reports I know of and give a short summary of each one. I’ve used most
of them in my essays but there are some that I haven’t been able to locate
(yet).

2). The
report Special conference on M-209 security is dated 1950 and looks into the German
exploitation of the US M-209 cipher machine. It is difficult to explain why the
people involved looked only at the available TICOM reports and not the actual
files of the German Army’s codebreaking agency Inspectorate 7/VI. These had
been retrieved in 1947 from a camp in Austria.

Overall it
seems to me that US reports are not as thorough
as they should be.

State
Department

I am not
aware of any State Department communications security report written after the
end of WWII. The ones available were produced during the war and submitted to
the US Joint Chiefs of Staff.

2). The
report of June 1944 can be found in the US National Archives and Records
Administration - collection RG 457- Entry 9032- box 1384 - 'JCS Ad hoc committee report on cryptographic
security of government communications'.

The problem
is that these reports only have theoretical evaluations of the State Department
cryptosystems, not information on their compromise by the Axis powers.

OSS

The Office of
Strategic Services was the predecessor of the CIA and during WWII its
overseas stations gathered military and political intelligence on the Axis
powers. For example in Bern, Switzerland the local OSS station (headed by Allen
Dulles) kept in contact with members of the German Resistance.

According to
an OSS veteran a report on WWII crypto security was prepared but I don’t have
any details.

Soviet Union

Both in the
Soviet era and today in modern Russia the files and archives of the signal
intelligence organizations remain closed to researchers. This makes it very
difficult to find information on Soviet cryptosystems and on whether the Soviet
authorities evaluated their communications security during WWII.

There are
files dealing with British Army communications at the National Archives,
collections WO
219 and WO
193. However these deal with cipher policy, not cipher compromises.

Navy

The report ADM
1/27186 ‘Review of
security of naval codes and cyphers 1939-1945’ is available from my Google
docs and Scribd folders. It is dated November 1945 and it was written after
examining the files of the German Navy’s codebreaking agency B-Dienst. Thus it
has an excellent analysis both of Royal Navy cipher policy and the compromise
of RN codes and ciphers.

RAF

The report AIR
20/1531 ’R.A.F.
signal communications: security’ can be found in the National Archives but
the information on the compromise of RAF systems is only based on decrypted
German messages, not other sources.

SOE

The Special
Operations Executive was an intelligence organization created during WWII.
I don’t know if a report on the compromise of SOE codes was ever prepared. The
British authorities certainly had the available information, since they
captured the War Diary of Inspectorate 7/VI in 1947 and this included the
summary reports of Referat 12 which dealt with Allied agents’ codes.

I requested
this report from the Czech Defense Ministry’s history department but they were
not able to locate it. Let’s hope that some Czech researcher will be able to
find it.

Poland

Polish
military, diplomatic, resistance movement and intelligence service codes were
read by the Germans during WWII. I don’t know if there are detailed reports in
the Polish government archives but the following sources have valuable
information.

1). The Cryptologia
article ‘From
the Archives: Polish Interwar MFA's Cipher Compromised?’ by Jan Bury presents
two reports written in 1940 and 1947 by the intelligence officer Major Tadeusz
Szumowski, concerning the security of the Polish diplomatic Code 45. According to Szumowski this codebook had been
compromised and the Germans could read the Polish diplomatic traffic since the
leadership of the Polish Foreign Ministry chose to keep using it despite his
warnings. Szumowski
was correct about this case.

Compromises
of communications security are usually difficult to acknowledge by the
countries that suffer them. For example since the 1970’s countless books have
been written about the successes of Bletchley Park, yet
detailed information on the Axis solution of Allied codes only started to
become available in the 2000’s when TICOM reports and other relevant documents
were released to the public archives by the US and UK authorities.

I’ve listed
some reports that deal with the compromise of Allied codes but I hope that
researchers will be able to locate more. Specifically: